But He Didn't See It That Way The academic job market, particularly in philosophy, is very rough. Typically, there are 300-400 applicants per job, at least 50 of which are equally highly qualified. There are also many biases at work in how people evaluate an application package. For example, there's a highly controversial informal "ranking"

Reasonable Expectations and Learning Experiences Gender binarism is the view that there are two, mutually exclusive genders: man and woman. This tends to align with there being only two, mutually exclusive sexes: male and female. (I don't buy into the clear sex/gender distinction, so I use male/female/man/woman interchangeably.) Oppositional sexism is the view that the

If You Want to Know if A Department is Friendly to Trans* Students, Ask Trans* Students A recent thread on the fantastic blog, Feminist Philosophers, asks for people to weigh in about what a prospective trans* PhD student can do about her situation in applying to grad programs, and there are also questions about general

Continuing Mispronouning Even After I Leave I've written in a bunch of posts how bad things got during the year following my transition at my previous department (from which I obtained my PhD). It took the bulk of the faculty (the grad students seemed to do much better) months, well over three months, to start

My First Post with a Disclaimer! Warning: I am going to talk about sex, sexuality, orgasms, and genitals in this post. If this topic is too intimate, or if you don't want to know the personal details that I discuss, I suggest you simply not read this post. I'll place the whole post below the

Do You Know About Yours? Many of us carry around at least some form of privilege. Some have many forms of privilege. Of course, we often didn't ask for this privilege, and we often didn't do anything to gain the privilege, but that doesn't mean we're not responsible for it. Privilege is essentially an unfair

An All-Too-Rare Email This may surprise you, or maybe it won't, but people rarely reach out to give feedback about this blog. I sometimes hear, eventually, that people really enjoy it, but they never directly tell me that they're enjoying it. I sometimes hear that it's really helping people, but, again, most people aren't going

Or, Do I Identify as Disabled? If you don't know about the Disabled Philosophers blog, you should, and you should check it out! A relatively recent post by a trans* woman got me thinking: am I disabled because I'm trans*? In the post, the anonymous philosopher offers a bit of her story and why she

…About One’s Lived Experience as a Trans* Academic? A recent email exchange with a colleague prompted this question. I’ve been writing this blog for a little under a year now (just shy of 11 months, actually). I was prompted to start the blog by a collague’s blog post that included a short wishlist of blogs

On Having Something to Say but Not Having a Voice Speech is an important part of being both human and social beings. It's central to our lives in ways we often don't realize. Much of my professional work in philosophy focuses on language; indeed, it's called the philosophy of language. Typically, I work on what